Despair, Divided
Arcane grips my horn implants, maintaining eye contact as ve guides me down to the bed. I’m flattered that ve’s taken on a corporeal form just for me. Arcane says ve knows how humans couple (couple—ve is, in fact, an old old god) and asks if that’s what I’d like from this experience. (Ve calls it an experience too.) I say I want whatever ve will give someone like me—someone tossed out of their home in the upper city and forced to make a life underground. Someone who knows the shitty metal in their body will one day give them cancer but collects mods like trophies anyway. I’m afraid to ask why ve’s chosen me—afraid to ruin a good thing or else acknowledge a bad one while it still feels good.
In this form, Arcane has a head, and ve tilts it at my words. “So we are both fallen, in our own ways.”
“What were you the god of?” I ask.
Arcane traces my mods as ve thinks: hand pausing at the patches of black scales on my shoulders, the spines down my back. Ve presses a finger into my mouth and finds steel-plated fangs. “Loss, despair,” ve answers distractedly.
Ver words settle heavy and cold. “As in…you brought despair?”
“I removed the despair of others into myself.”
I relax. There is so much despair in Lower Providence. “You mean you took those feelings away?”
“Yes.”
“Was that…” I don’t know how to talk to a god. I didn’t know they existed until recently. I lick my lips and catch my tongue on the point of a fang, something I haven’t done in years. My mouth tastes like metal as I say, “It sounds like a nice thing to do for people.”
Take my despair. Take it. The plea leaps to my mind, unbidden.
At that, Arcane finally returns my gaze—if it could be considered that. Ve has voids where ver eyes should be, but somehow I know ve’s regarding me more closely. I realize, perhaps, that ve heard my thoughts as a prayer. If so, it was my first.
“I can give you bodily pleasure,” ve says, ver tone haunted by something like regret. “That will have to suffice.”
“Yeah, ‘course,” I say. I lick my lips bloody.
How do you make love to a god of despair? I wonder, even as it happens. There are things one can’t say. I couldn’t beg for ver to fill me, as ve is empty—the fissures in ver gray skin revealing the nothingness within. I couldn’t breathe against ver neck and whisper how much I wanted ver body—for it was not a body but a hollow and temporary vessel. Ve seems aware of this—in ver first tentative touches, in ver questioning glances. Ve seems braced for a look that would betray my repulsion of ver form, then softens when it never appears.
“I want you to pin me down,” I say.
Ve does, and they weigh nothing and everything. They are the condensed hopelessness in my chest. They are the numbness that follows tears. I gasp at the sensation. Ve releases me as if worried I’m hurt. I hold them—as if my mortal body could do anything against a force so deep and old. Ve kisses me. My tongue quests into ver mouth and it too is empty. When ve withdraws, I realize I’m crying.
“I warned you of this,” ve says.
I huff and swipe at my eyes. I shove a strap-on harness at ver. Ve seems baffled by the neon dildo.
“Fuck me,” I say, throat still tight.
“Only if you are—happy.” Ve stumbles into the last word.
“Are you happy?” I counter.
Ve laughs with ver mouth closed.
In another moment, perhaps it might be comical: Arcane—with ver gray skin and lank black hair and void eyes—sporting a jutting pink dildo. But the anticipation of fucking a god would make anyone breathless.
†
Arcane doesn’t leave when we’re done. Ve looms by my bedside, studying me with ver eyeless gaze. I decide to give ver a pass on ver lack of etiquette. Ve is old. Maybe ve’s new to this hooking up thing.
“Do you…often have sex with humans?” I ask.
“You’re the only one.”
That makes me sit up. “Why me?”
“You remind me of someone from the old days. Someone I was close to.”
“Are they not around anymore?”
Arcane returns to the bed, hovering just over the sheets. “How is your despair?” ve asks.
“You mean to ask how I’m feeling,” I correct.
“Yes.” Ve traces from my horn to my chin. If an eyeless gaze can be tender, this is it. “How are you feeling?”
In the void I see my own emptiness reflected back. I find a grim triumph in the observation: here, at my lowest, a god looks upon me. Even in the dark, I can touch the divine.
My smile bares my fangs. Arcane’s answer is my second prayer, a conjuring of what could be—for me, for us both.
© 2022 Tamara Jerée
About the Author
Tamara Jerée has moved from the cornfields of Alabama and Mississippi to the cornfields of Indiana in pursuit of their writing dreams. They’re a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and Purdue University MFA Program and work as a writer in the video game industry. Their poetry and fiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Uncanny Magazine.